RETHINKING THE WORKPLACE FOR THE POST-PANDEMIC AGE

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended normal office routine and made organizations rethink their workplace strategy and work culture.

Before the pandemic, offices were deemed necessary for employees’ productivity, collaboration, culture-building and training. With the crisis and government-mandated social distancing, work from home (WFH) became widespread. The results have been both surprising and encouraging as organizations realise that WFH is possible, changing attitudes on the role of offices.

The rise in WFH and increased concern for health and well-being at the workplace will be COVID-19’s greatest impact on the built environment. Boundaries between home and the office will change.

Is WFH a sustainable long-term solution? Why would anyone need to go to the office? While WFH has its advantages, there are downsides too. To name a few, collaboration and logistics are harder. Creativity is reduced. Body language and eye contact are lost. Hiring, training and integrating new employees become more challenging (Cutter, 2020).

Clearly, the role of offices must be rethought and transformed for a post COVID-19 world. Workspaces need to be redesigned to better support collaborative interactions that are not possible in a WFH environment. New ways of making face-to-face interactions feel safe and comfortable again must be found.

This thesis reviews the impact of COVID-19 on work and the workplace as well as emerging trends in the future of work and reimagines the typology, spaces and programming of workplaces in a post-COVID world. It relied on existing literature, surveying historical and contemporary research on workplace designs. As for ventilation, scientific research journals were referred to and airflow analysis was done using computational fluid dynamic simulations.